By now, you’ve no doubt heard about the lawsuits that the Edwin Mellen Press brought against McMaster University librarian Dale Askey. One of those suits (which also named McMaster as a plaintiff) was subsequently dropped, but as far as I know at this writing the other (naming Askey alone) still stands. I’m not writing to […]

Do librarians really get sued, or threatened with lawsuits, all that often? It is hard to say. My initial impression is that they do not get haled into court very often, but it is very difficult to know about threats. There may be more saber-rattling than we know about, and if such threats actually prevent librarians from taking the challenged action, we might never know about it. That is called a “chilling effect,” and there is a website devoted to cataloging such threats, which librarians should be aware of and, I think, contribute to when appropriate.

Update (3/11/2013) ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) are urging that the second law suit against Dale Askey be dropped. Here’s their joint statement. Also available here. —- As infoDOCKET pointed out the other day when Mellen Press ended one lawsuit with librarian Dale Askey and McMaster University there […]

The Edwin Mellen Press has dropped one of two lawsuits against librarian Dale Askey, the press announced in a release dated March 1, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The move came after McMaster University, named as a co-defendant in one of the two suits, reportedly “made arrangements to ensure Associate University Librarian Dale […]

What interesting times we live in. I just got a panicked call from a professor who asked her students to find reviews of YA books that had appeared at the time they were originally published. She suddenly realized she didn’t know how to find a review of a now-classic Judy Blume novel that she planned to use as an example. She couldn’t find any reviews from 1970 on the web. She couldn’t find any in our databases, which often don’t have full text that far back. The Publisher’s Weekly review posted at Amazon is not from the time of the original publication, but refers to a later reissue. The author’s website didn’t include reviews from 1970. And here she’d thought it was a simple assignment.

In 2010, Dale Askey was a tenured associate professor at Kansas State University (K-State) when he made a blog post about Edwin Mellen Press. Since removed from the blog, the post called Mellen a “dubious publisher,” saying that the press occasionally publishes a worthy title and is not technically a vanity publisher, but that “much of what they publish is simply second-class scholarship.” Askey removed the post in March 2012. Three months later, Edwin Mellen Press filed two libel lawsuits in Ontario’s Superior Court.